A few weeks ago, I published a quick post about how evanescent Evangelism is. As your tech brand grows and builds awareness, you face important questions.  

What is Evangelism anyway? 

Might seem stupid, but why not start with a quote from the current Pope?

“Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, they should appear as
people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty
and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by
proselytising that the Church grows, but “by attraction”.

Replace “Church” by your company name and you will see that it makes a lot of sense. You can now perceive the difference between evangelism and proselytism.

Dealing with the lassitude attitude

When you bring good news nobody knew about, it is quite easy to generate attraction and follow the Pope's word. But if your core message is not fresh, then how do you maintain the powerful “I'm bringing you the light” effect? How can you “propose a horizon of beauty?” 

The danger I was evoking in my last post is the temptation to switch from evangelism to proselytism.

At first, when you bring the good news for a great product that nobody knows about, it is quite easy to evangelise. Everything you have to say is interesting: we'll call this the "romance stage."

However, if you're successful, your message will get tougher to push. Once the people are aware of your existence, they become friends (or at least "professional acquaintances"). But you can forget about the wow effect caused by your product. Curiosity is gone.

At the very same time, the management puts more pressure on acquisition, as the business now needs to scale as fast as possible.*  This is the moment when evangelism requires a long term vision, supported by true believers. This is how I understand the following tweet: 

@Elie__ @madflo @timfalls @romainhuet It is a very specific type of
marketing to which an org must be committed. Not for everyone.

— Rob Spectre (@dN0t) March 28, 2014

Technology-Driven Evangelism VS Product-Driven Proselytism 

Because evangelism is about a technology rather than a product in particular, you will need new communication pillars. You develop projects that don't relate to your core activity: tools, news platforms, social networks...

Think about Twilio Doers or Sendgrid Labs. In fact, startups should have this approach from Day One: look at Runscope's community projects. The project I just joined has the same strategy: OAuth.io is the product, and around it you have APIdays, APIscene, etc. (at some extent, I could also mention the Open Source version of the SaaS, OAuthd).

Running side-projects is an excellent way to keep your evangelism from turning into proselytism. It prevents you from being self-absorbed and helps you to build meaningful relationships. Of course, there are some downsides: it's so easy to lose focus because of side-projects. Especially when you start doing this from day one...   

One great situation where you don't really face these challenges is when your technology is almost "unique." Think about Twitter or even context.io : they don't really have competitors, so their product is merged with their technology. This makes things easier :) 

Jesus Probably Didn't Track Conversions (aka, the Evangelist ROI Problem) 

Community side-projects are great because they provide touch points which allow you to measure success. For example: with API Digest, John Sheehan can see if subscribers tend to convert into Runscope customers. He could even think about subtle ways to convert the leads generated, as long as he respects the community rules. 

However, let's get back to the human side: Can you really track demand generated by a developer evangelist? Sometimes, yes. But is it her primary mission? I'm not sure. Let's quote Brandon, the Lead Evangelist from Sendgrid who commented on my initial post:

"If evangelism were not working (returning a positive ROI) we'd stop
doing it. You claim there isn't much value in relationships and that
events don't generate leads. Our numbers disagree. It's a matter of
smart targeting and frankly being good at these things."

I never said that there was no value in relationships, but that's not the point.  As stated in Rob's tweet, evangelism is a "type of marketing." That doesn't mean it has to be about lead generation.

Demand Generation is a type of marketing that drives sales in the short term. See below how CMOs tend to spend their money: 

From my point of view, Evangelism must focus on branding and customer equity. Developer Evangelists who would be focusing on Demand Generation would be Sales Reps doing proselytism.

The ROI Problem  

As marketers, we have a tendency to focus on "Demand Generation" because that's the easiest thing to measure. 

For branding, you need... brand awareness studies. For customer equity, you look at customer satisfaction, but how are you going to relate a change of mood to the presence of your evangelists at a particular event? Can you really imply that churn reduced because of a hackathon you sponsored?

It's not impossible to answer these questions, but it's not easy either. Hence, a lot of people believe they're going to measure evangelism success with the number of leads generated.

Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean it's the most efficient thing.  

I have quite a few other arguments but I guess you get my message. If I have time, I'll go deeper in this evangelism ROI thing. How can you measure? Hint: the side projects aforementioned  really help. 

• NOTE: in this post, just like in the previous one, I tend to use present tenses. I remove the conditional "would XXX" to make the situation more real. This is an archetypal story built as I'm writing: I am not making any assumptions about the mechanics of any company in particular!